Journey To Being an Online Poker Pro

I’ve been doing some reading and apparently it was announced a little while ago that AJ Benza would not be brought back to do another season of the wildly popular High Stakes Poker on the Game Show network.  As you might imagine, reactions to the news have been quick and the poker forums have been lit up with comments and opinions.  I don’t understand this move myself.  So far there hasn’t been any official reason for the change and it breaks up one of the most entertaining commentating teams on TV, not just poker.  AJ Benza played a great straight man and sometimes fodder to Gabe Kaplan’s jokes and insults, even sometimes throwing it back at Mr. Kotter.  For the first couple of years, their schtick was so good that a lot of people weren’t sure whether the two actually liked each other or not.  And while Benza was no poker expert by any means, he obviously had learned quickly, sounding more confident with each season in talking about the game and what was happening on the felt.

Needless to say, Benza was not impressed by the decision and who can blame him?  He has been quoted as saying, “If you got the best pizza in town for 5 seasons, why try and add licorice to it?”  Couldn’t agree more.  I know that shows facing a decline in ratings will try to shake things up, tweak a format here and there but when your show has been number 1 for five years than you can see why it’s a bit of a head scratcher.  The WPT has been showing a decline in ratings and attendance over the past two or three years and I bet replacing either Mike Sexton or Vince Van Patten is the last thing they are considering.

Read more…

I think most of us know that a “tell” at the poker table is something a player does that gives away the strength or weakness of their hand.  It could be a way they put their chips in the pot, how their sitting after they’ve bet, etc.  These are tells for a live game.  But what about online?  Some will tell you that there are no tells online.  Those people are absolutely 100% wrong.  There are many tells online and that’s what I’m going to talk about today.  I’ll save tells in a live game for another time.  Now you may be thinking, “How can there be tells online if I can’t see the person I’m playing against?”  I guess the short answer is “Because not all tells are physical”.  Here are some examples and what you can possibly interpret from them.

Preclicking the action buttons

Ever notice when the action is moving around the table that someone will look like they’re insta-folding, insta-calling, or even insta-raising?  That’s because they’ve clicked on one of the action buttons (Fold, Call, Raise/Call Any, Check/Fold etc.) buttons before it was their turn to act.  You can gain lots of information from them right away.  Let’s say for instance that you notice a player insta-folding more than a few times.  This means that they don’t like their hand right away and are probably looking for a bigger hand to get involved.  Now, when they do raise you can be pretty sure that they have a big hand.  Even if they just limp in preflop you can narrow their range of hands to medium pairs and maybe KQ and KJ.  Now you can proceed appropriately.

Multi-tabling

This could be a few things.  One is that they’re distracted by maybe a movie or TV show playing in the background.  Two, they’ve gotten up to grab something from the fridge and didn’t make it back right away to act on time.  But, if the person keeps acting slower than usual than he may be multi-tabling and this can also be a tell?  Obviously lots of people are able to play 4, 5, even 6 tables at a time and are able to decide quickly.  But if you go to the Lobby of your online site, do a Player Search, and see a person is playing a whole bunch of tables than you can be sure of one thing.  He’s going to be playing super tight and only big hands.  I’ve seen people playing as many as 24 tables at a time.  It was unbelievable.  But, I also noticed that when he was in a pot and he won he was showing the big hand every time.  When you’re playing that many tables you don’t have time to think about bluffs or what the other person could be holding.  You’re playing your cards and your cards only.  There’s no way when you play that many tables that you’re going to be picking up on other player’s tendencies, their possible tells, etc.  On the other hand, players who play this many tables will also go to the Lobby and click on the Hide From Search feature.  That way, unless you decide to check out all of the tables on the level you’re playing to see if that person is multi-tabling, you won’t know how many tables he’s playing.

Read more…

Taking a break from some cash games where things haven’t been going so great I decided to play a few Sit and Go (S&G) tournaments.  These are sort of mini tournaments where buy ins can be, depending on the site, anywhere from $1 to $1000 or more and have a set amount of entrants allowed.  They start when the predetermined entrants are registered.  You can play one table or multi-table S&G’s as well.  I like to play the one table S&G tournaments myself and they seem to be the most popular.   Everyone starts at 1500 in tournament chips and the blinds at 15/30 and go up every ten minutes.  This can be a good way to practice your final table game although you don’t start a final table of a multi table tournament with the same amount of chips of course. People generally have to make the final 3 to make the cash and prize pools are divided like this: 1st- 50%  2nd- 30% 3rd- 20%.

Read more…

I was playing at the casino not too long ago and again in a home game that I occasionally frequent and I was blown away by a couple of things that I saw.  No, not a horrific bad beat or some donkey chasing down a 4 outer to bust a guy on the river.  No, it was worse than that.  It was unbelievably horrible poker etiquette.  I know this is a game where we’re supposed to try and take everything from our opponents and when they go on tilt, our task can become that much easier.  However, there is an etiquette involved when playing this game and I’m going to go over a few of the examples I saw when playing live plus some others in general.

Slow Rolling

This one is by far the worst of them all.  Not to be confused with slow playing which is obviously OK.  Slow rolling is when a hand gets shown down and you intentionally take your time in showing what you know is the winner.  For example, if you’re holding AA and the board is A A K 8 2, you know you have the best hand possible.  So many times I’ve seen people with the nuts either wait for their opponent to show their cards or they go for the dramatic effect and slowly turn their cards over.  When you have the best hand (and it’s usually pretty obvious when you do) then just show it right away and collect the chips.  There’s no need to show up your opponent.  He’s probably going to be tilting anyway from losing a big pot without dumbass antics like slowrolling involved.  Anyone who does it intentionally should have to get junk punched from the person he did it to.  The only time it’s OK is when you’re good friends with someone and you have that kind of relationship.  I have a friend that I can get away with stuff like that.  There was one funny episode of Poker After Dark where Antonio Esfandiari slow rolls Phil Laak and I say it’s funny because those two are always trying to bust each other.  To illustrate how these two love to go at each other, here is a video on a previous episode where Antonio calls Phil’s all in…. And now,  here is the slowroll Other than that though, just show your cards

Read more…

What is semi-bluffing?  Basically, it’s betting with a hand that isn’t that strong at the moment but could turn into a big hand on later streets.  The semi-bluff is a very useful weapon for a poker player but the real key is using it at the right time.    The reason it’s a strong weapon is because it gives you two ways to win.  Your opponent may fold their hand or they can call and you hit your hand and end up winning the pot that way.

There are a lot of players out there that like to semi-bluff almost every draw and that’s a mistake.  The ever observant player is going to see you doing this and is going to start putting you on that draw.  If they have a big hand, like maybe a set, they’re going to raise you to make you pay for hitting your draw.  When you have the nut draw, a lot of people like to check/raise in these spots.  If you think your opponent has hit any part of the flop, be it top pair/good kicker, two pair, or a set than the check/raise becomes unneccessary.  They’re going to call you at least one time no matter what.  If you push too hard and miss your draw, you’ve put in more money than you really needed to.  And remember, if you flop something like a flush draw you’re only going to hit it by the river around 36% of the time.   Even if you just check/call down your draw and it gets there on the river, most of the time you will get paid.  It is very hard to lay down a set even when they know they’re beat.

Read more…

Terrible week of online poker.  After getting up to $227 I went down hard, losing $60 over the past few days.  One thing I have to keep remembering is to not sit at a table when I’m tired.  Sometimes I force myself to play because the amount of time I get to play can be so limited and when I do get to sit down I’m really tired and make bad decisions.  There were the usual really bad calls and draw chasing against the odds that got there as well and the whole combination made for a bad few days.  I’m going to take a couple days off playing just to regroup a little bit.  I’ll do that after a few bad sessions.  I take some time away just so I can come back with a fresh outlook, usually forgetting about what happened the previous times.  It’s very important to go into a session as fresh as possible.  The game can be hard enough without adding things like being tired or frustrated to it.  That just leads to bad calls and bad plays and now you’re really on a downward slide

So this weekend I focussed more on doing stuff with my son in my spare time.  He had volleyball camp today and they really make the kids work hard.  He’s getting in the shower now (voluntarily, which is unheard of for a 9 year old boy) and he says he’s going to bed early because he’s tired.  Best $147 I’ve ever invested!  lol  After he gets out we’ll go and continue reading the final Harry Potter book.  We love the movies although we didn’t like the last one because it left out so much from the book compared to the other movies.  They added a bunch of unnecessary scenes to it as well which was odd, considering the parts they left out and some were quite important to the overall story.  We want to read the final one (I’ve already read it 4 times, it’s so good) before the final movies come out.  The final book is being split into two movies which is a great idea because of how big the final book is.

OK, he’s out and it’s time for me to go.  I need to have a nap as well before I get ready for work.  Hopefully soon, a day off is coming.  I’m just not sure when that will be.  Til next time, good luck at the tables.

The last post I wrote (Pot Odds, The Rule of Four, and Betting) leads into today’s topic.  As you start to play a little bit more, you may have heard the term small ball poker and wondered what it was.  Basically it means winning lots of smaller pots with smaller sized bets.  Home run poker, on the other hand, is winning pots with larger bets.  More skilled players tend to play small ball while it is a good idea for beginners to go for the home run.  The reasoning is very simple and it has a lot to do with pot odds.  Like I said in the previous post, poker is a very mathematical game and when employed properly can make you or save you lots of money.  If you listen to Mike Caro (and you should) then folding when you’re supposed to actually makes you money as well.  Below are the reasons for playing each:

Small Ball Poker

Like I said above, more skilled players tend to play this way.  I know it is heavily endorsed by Daniel Negreanu and he has some videos on YouTube that talk about it as well.  They tend to keep the pots a bit smaller but then win more pots with betting.  Preflop, the raises tend to be in the 2.5-3x the big blind (BB) with an extra BB unit per person that may have already limped in front of you.  For example, you’re playing $1/2 and you know you’re going to raise.  Your raise will usually be $5-6 total.  If one limper is in front of you, you’ll make it $7-8, two limpers, $9-10 etc.  Now a flop comes out that you don’t think helped your opponent(s) and you want to bet (as most players do after raising preflop, firing the continuation bet).  How much do you bet?  In the last post about pot odds I talked about how half to two thirds is enough to make it the wrong call to chase most draw.  Hands like open ended straight and flush draws are one of the exceptions as those draws are mathematically favoured against most hands.  So, say you bet that $6, get called by one person and both blinds fold.  That’s $15 in the pot (your bet + opponent’s call +$1SB +$2BB = $15).  A correct bet would be between $8-10.  You will get a surprising amount of callers a lot of the time and it’s because a lot of players ignore pot odds.  Don’t be that person! I mean, sometimes if you’re the one that’s drawing you’re going to call because not everyone has the hand they’re representing.  Everyone and their dog C-bets the flop now and sometimes you’ll have the best hand even with your draw.  If you’re holding KQ of spades, the flop is J 10 2 with two spades, and your opponent has pocket 7’s, guess what?  You are favoured to win by the river because if you hit one of 9 spades, 3 aces, 3 nines, 3 kings, and 3 queens, you will take the lead.  So, you can’t lay it down every time.  You don’t want it to look like you can just be run over.  You could call one time and if they didn’t hit their hand, may check the turn to you.  You can make a semi-bluff (a bluff that could turn into a big hand and another post topic for another time) and win the pot either by him folding, or him calling and you hit your draw.

Read more…

Here’s a statement that, while those that play this game a lot already know, many may find unusual: Poker is not about winning the most or the biggest pots. It’s not even about winning money. Huh? What do you mean it’s not about winning money? At it’s core, poker is about one thing…making correct decisions. Now, what could that mean? Making correct decisions is what enables you to make money. If you’re making correct decisions all the time than money will follow. And one of the ways to help you make these correct decisions involve using pot odds. Pot odds are essentially the odds of hitting your hand vs. the amount of money it will take to call a bet in relation to how much is in the pot already. Again…huh? This is where we start to use simple division (yes, I know…MATH!) Poker is a very mathematical game.

Let’s break it down by using some examples. Let’s say you’re playing a $1/2 game and the turn has brought you the nut flush draw. That’s 9 cards that will help your hand. There’s $20 in the pot and your opponent has bet $5. OK, so at this point out of 52 cards in the deck, we know what six of them are…your two cards plus the four on the board. That leaves 46 unknown cards. Out of those 46 cards, we know that 9 will help you and 37 cards don’t help you. So, we divide 37/9 and get about 4.1 to 1, or 4.1-1. Now, you look at the pot. It’s costing you $5 to win $25 ($20 in the pot plus the $5 bet). That means you divide 25/5 and you get 5-1 which means you should call. When the odds of what it takes to call vs. what it takes to hit your hand is higher, then it is correct to call.

Let’s do another example. Same $1/2 stakes. You hold J 10 and the flop is 9c 8s 4h. Again, there’s $20 already in the pot and he bets $5. How many outs (cards that will help make your hand) do you have? Well, let’s take a look. You can win with 4 Queens or 4 7’s to make a straight. That’s 8 outs. It’s also conceivable that your opponent could have pocket 5’s or 6’s and that any jack or any 10 will also give you the best hand but for now we’ll just deal with what you are pretty sure will give you the best hand. OK, so we figured out we have 8 outs. Now, we remember that we have 5 cards we know, leaving 47 we don’t. Minus the 8 cards that help us that leaves us with odds of 39-8 or 4.1 to win. Seeing that it will now cost us $5 to win $25 ($20 in the pot plus the $5 your opponent bet) that’s $25/5 or 5-1. Because the odds the pot is laying us is greater than the odds we need to hit our hand, we need to at least call here. If you just call, that will leave $30 in the pot. Now a nothing 2 comes on the turn and he bets $15. Now you have 46 unseen cards, 8 outs for 36/8 and pretty much still just over 4-1 to win. Now we look at the pot. It will cost us $15 to win $45. 45/15 is 3-1. All of a sudden the odds of hitting our hand are bigger than what the pot is laying us to call. Right here we need to fold as it becomes unprofitable in the long run to call. And that’s what you’re looking for. What will help me win in the long run? You may make that call and hit your 7 on the river and think you’ve made the right play, but eventually you will lose more money than you’ll gain by making this play.

Read more…

Texas Hold Em is a game of missing information, usually in relation to what your opponent is holding in his hand. There are different ways to try and gain more information such as tells, betting patterns, your observations of how he/she’s played their hands previously.

Another way is through table talk. People will try to talk to their opponents, asking them questions in hopes that their answers (or non-answers) will give some sort of indication as to what they are holding. Questions like “Will you show if I fold?” and “Do you want me to call?”are asked a lot. A lot of the times they aren’t even looking for a specific answer though. They’re looking for the WAY you answer. If someone asks you “How much do you have left?” then they are looking for a few things because observant, skilled players know exactly how much is in front of you. Quirks in your voice, is it cracked because you’re nervous? Are you fumbling with your chips as you go to count for them? Has your breathing increased or decreased? All these little bits of information can lead your opponent to putting you on a hand that either helps them save money by folding or betting because they’ve picked something up that tells them you aren’t that strong.

Read more…

If you’ve seen the movie Rounders (which I HIGHLY recommend) then you’ve heard the saying “If you can’t find the sucker at the table, then you’re the sucker”. Hopefully by reading and implementing some of the advice I give in this blog, you will not only not be that guy but be able to find the sucker at your table and exploit him for all his chips.

There are four basic types of player out there: Tight/Aggressive, Tight/Passive, Loose/Passive (or calling station), Loose-Aggressive/Aggressive. Each indicates how the play before the flop and then after the flop. I’ll break down each and then you can probably tell me at the end which ones you should be targeting.

Tight/Aggressive

This is the guy that I think plays the game in the most efficient way. I try to play this way. Tight preflop, looking for good quality starting hands and raising them preflop. After the flop, you want to bet at it about 80% of the time. By raising preflop, you’re telling the table you have a good hand and almost no matter what comes out there you want to continue showing strength. Even if you flop top set, you need to bet it that 80% of the time. I believe you actually make more money by betting your strong hands than you do checking them, because checking a lot of the times raises alarm bells in your opponent’s head. If a flop comes QQJ and you bet out holding AQ, you might get called more than you think by someone holding a jack or some sort of straight draw like 10 9 suited or K 10, both hands that people might call a preflop raise with. Hopefully someone has KQ and you can bust them. Also, when people see you betting out that 80% of the time, obviously they’re not going to believe you have a strong hand every time so you’re going to get raised sometimes. Sometimes you’ll have to let it go because you’ve been caught, barring any read you have on your opponent that tells you he’s bluffing. But when they do raise, and you do have the goods, you’re going to either repop them or smooth call and then hit them on the turn. It will confuse your opponent when they see you bet out your strong hands as well as with nothing and they’ll have a harder time putting you on a hand. That 20% is to mix up your game even more, because now they don’t know if you’re check/raising them or if you’ve missed the flop. They may just check behind because they’re unsure, giving you a free card to hopefully hit your hand on the turn. I try not to get too involved with these players unless I’m holding a monster.

Read more…